About Me

I'm a 62 year old married woman living in West Yorkshire. Until a few years ago I was juggling two busy jobs with running a craft business but I took early retirement from both of them in order to follow my creative dreams.
I mainly make jewellery but have recently re-engaged with my first love of fabric crafts by way of wet felting and embroidery.
I'm also a wire-work-a-holic and regularly list my wire designs in my Etsy supplies shop.
We live in a large early nineteenth century house with a garden that we never seem to quite get on top of, though we have a lot of fun trying.
We have a much loved cat, Bilbo, who has us totally twisted around his little paws.

Saturday, 14 November 2009

New vintage venture!

Yes, I'm still alive!!! I cannot believe just how long it's been since I've blogged ... life feels to have whizzed on apace recently and left me in its wake. Hopefully I'm getting back on an even keel now, fingers crossed...

And I am totally amazed and thrilled to find that in so many months I haven't lost any followers, you are all wonderful!!

Well, for better or for worse, I've gone mad and opened a second shop on Etsy:

The jewellery category on Etsy is very full and I figured it may be a good idea all round to open another shop in a less saturated category.

We have a ton of broken old books, relics of the days when Roger was bulk buying them to re-sell on FeeBay. They're not re-bindable as each one has some pages damaged beyond repair and some missing altogether. And obviously I check that none of them are at all rare, either.

So I've decided to de-construct them and offer them for sale in the Etsy vintage section for all the altered art/collage/decoupage artists and scrapbookers out there who I fondly imagine are waiting to snap them up.

De-constructing books is actually great fun! Even though, as a part time librarian, I should be considering it a crime... (Having tackled my oldest item, a very battered dictionary, I can confirm that 18th century bookbinding string was pretty tough stuff!)

At the moment I just have a few variety packs of whole pages listed, plus some cut outs from colour plates that came from an equally battered 1869 edition of Mrs Beeton.

The Mrs Beeton illustrations and recipes are amazing - lamb cutlets with green peas sounds very appetizing but I'm not at all sure about calf's ears a la financiere?! I've some more to list and they include some positively architectural desserts. The lengths people went to to make even simple food look elaborate in Victorian times were amazing.

If there's any of you out there who have a fancy for vintage and would like to offer any suggestions I'd be deeply grateful. I did post on the Etsy forums a few times and got some good hints but any further thoughts will be very welcome indeed - thanks!